UK Retailers Accused of Blacklisting Steam-Required PC Games

[Xelt]

Why is a Russian magazine reporting on this, and not, say, a British one?

Both CVG and MCV are UK-based sites, as far as I'm aware.

Surprisingly enough, I've never eeven seen a CVG, and the only MCV near here shut down years ago to be replaced with a HMV.
We have GAME. It's all thats needed !
Also, GAME still seem to stock steamgames, such as Dawn Of War 2.

 

[Kaymish]

well when i last went to dikies or EB games or jb hi-fi the PC games has a little shef and didnt have what i wanted anyway
and i have wondered what not stocking a steam game is going to do imean how is not stocking a game going to boost sales people who want the game are going to know its steam powered so they are going to get it there sure the dev and publisher are going to lose out on luddite gamers but so are the traditional retailers unless the ludites move to amazon this move only costs the traditional retaliar and will put them out of busness faster

 

[Debirufisshu]

Fuck UK retailers, I stopped using them when they stopped stocking PC games (and no, those 'soldout' 3 for £10 games dont count). This is equal to a child throwing away a toy and then gets upset when another child picks it up. You have made your bed, UK retailers! and now you shall lie in it!

 

[Cousin_IT]

Competition in the digital distribution market is a good thing and should be encouraged - but threatening publishers into avoiding it entirely? That's pretty low.

Retailers, bother physical & digital, being "forced" to effectively sell a competitors product (Steamworks requires Steam, after all) to their customers is no less low, really.

 

[RuralGamer]

The only reason I don't use steam all the time is because I have a pretty restricted monthly download limit (about 20GB) due to my rural location. But I have noticed over time that my local Gamestation has been stocking increasingly fewer PC games, but they still have tons of Steam ones; I think its more that people are going elsewhere for them.
But this kind of behaviour is the reason they don't get my patronage when I go into the city; the selection in Edinburgh is shocking and so in the end its places like Play.com who get my money.

 

[5t3v0]

with all this shafting us PC gamers receive its little wonder why we are all pessimistic and bitter. Console gamers STILL do not know how easy they get it.

 

[AngryMongoose]

Hahaha, let's see how this works out for them yeah?

 

[Knife-28]

I compleatly, 100% agree with this descision. If I buy a game in a retail store, I expect it to be able to install it right out of the box, not have to install Steam to simply play the game. Valve, in my opinion, are compleat dicks for creating this system in the first place.Now, I don't hate digital distrabution, I don't use it very often, but I don't hate it.

That said, I will be awaiting the inevital anger this will draw from the hoard of Valve fanboys thinking 'Valve is teh best, they can do no evil, herr derr.'

 

[Keava]

I compleatly, 100% agree with this descision. If I buy a game in a retail store, I expect it to be able to install it right out of the box, not have to install Steam to simply play the game. Valve, in my opinion, are compleat dicks for creating this system in the first place.Now, I don't hate digital distrabution, I don't use it very often, but I don't hate it.

That said, I will be awaiting the inevital anger this will draw from the hoard of Valve fanboys thinking 'Valve is teh best, they can do no evil, herr derr.'

Problem lies in what Steamworks actually is. It offers cloud computing for user data like save games and profiles, it offers achievements system, it's a community portal, a distribution service and of course a DRM scheme.

Thing is as a developer you can't really just choose the DRM and opt-out from the rest of the package. You take all or nothing and as far as DRM schemes go Steamworks offer the least outrage from the "community".

They could of course make a Steamworks Lite version that would only manage DRM, cloud and achievements but i doubt they would really want to from business point of view.

 

[Treblaine]

The way digital disribution is going, Valve have basically set up a monopoly

HOOOOW??

Microsoft blackballed all the competition to get Windows numero uno.

You know who made Steam successful? Microsoft. Microsoft and their utterly terrible Games for Windows Live DRM and all the other foolish companies that tried to take the same path and failed. They pushed all PC gamers to Steam as it was the only company that actually put effort into making DRM streamlined and so invisible most people don't even see Steam as DRM... because DRM had become synonymous with "broken game".

Valve isn't the only company on the market who understands the audience they are trying to sell to. There is also Gog.com and now Origin. Blizzard games are completely separate from Steam. But Steam saw this market a LOooooong time ago, way back in 2003.

 

[Sebenko]

Oh no! whatever will I do?

I'll have to stop trekking five miles into the nearest town to deal with the dicks in town to find their pitiful little shop that only has one shelf of PC games and- OH the horror! Use the simple and convenient digital download system. However shall I go on?

 

[Zac Smith]

Err...last time I checked the PC game shelves in my local gamestop and other electonic stores, there's Fallout: New Vegas and several other game titles with steamworks logo...damnit, forgetting titles..atleast I know it says steamworks on most of them, I've checked.

So, this only in the UK then or happening other places?

You have shelves dedicated to PC games in your shops?

Now there is just a spot for WoW right next to the 360 shit in my local gamestop.

Might not buy so many games through digital distribution if the retailers actually sold any...

Yup, dedicated sections for each console, 360, PS3 Wii, DS / Gameboy, 90% of the time, a used section for each aswell plus used PS2 games. My local gamestation also has UMD films for PSP couple of blueray's and a cabinet with old N64 kind of stuff

 

[harvz]

uh, most people who buy pc games are getting them on digital distribution systems such as steam because the "brick and mortar" stores rip you off at every turn (especially in australia, duke nukem forever for example is $80USD [AUD is stronger so its about 5% less], the same game on pc from ebgames is $98AUD, $108AUD for a console version)

 

[The_root_of_all_evil]

many of the UK's largest game retailers were threatening to refuse to stock PC games...

Fixed that. Most of the UK retail sector stock the white label games only and occasionally an AAA title if it's out on console as well. That's how Steam took off so well, because HMV etc. wouldn't stock the games.

 

[JediMB]

Everyone, everyone should refuse games that require internet connection, DRM or any other shit, such as terrible software client running on the background all the time, if I'm buying a retail copy of a single-player game at a store.

10 ? games with no DRM from gog.com? All right. 50 ? games on a DVD that require Steam? No. Never.

I want to store my game on a shelf and install it whenever I want, even 20 years from now, on any computer I want, without any stupid passwords.

Steam games only require a one-time activation through an Internet connection. After that you're free to run them offline as you see fit. It's less intrusive than most non-Steamworks retail games, really.

Since I don't tend to use the Steam store for new games, I can usually get them in retail for ?30-40. Then I type the game key into Steam, and it actually downloads/installs the game faster than it would install it from the disc. (Not to mention that Steam's installation process is just overall more convenient.)

I just had to laugh at the "without any stupid passwords" part. As if we don't already have a market besides Steam where pretty much every fucking game requires you to input a password in either the form of a game install key or an account login... or both.

 

[Moonlight Butterfly]

I've noticed that Game doesn't seem to have a very good selection of PC games nowadays. They have the big names like The Sims 3, Crysis 2 etc but the rest is all old games and stuff, I don't live in a large city but it was suprising to me how little choice they had compared to the last time I was in there.

I guess this explains why.

 

[JediMB]

I want to have control over what I own, if the winds change in say 10-15 years, STEAM goes down, and I say want to play "Fallout: New Vegas" I'm pretty well screwed...

Except Valve have promised that in the event that Steam would go down, all its games will be "freed" from the Steam servers. If this would happen in the form of patches or separate installers remains to be seen, though, and I sincerely believe that Steam will still be running as usual in another 15 years.